I’m being more and more tempted to upgrade to Dragon Naturallyspeaking Preferred version 9 for speech recognition on my Vista computer. I know, I was initially very impressed with Windows Speech Recognition, but the more I use it, the more frustrated I get.

There are one or two niggles, which I’ll come to shortly, but the most annoying thing is that using the correction dialogue and navigating about a document by voice has become very slow. When I issued the correct command, the alternates panel used to come up reasonably quickly; now it can take as long as half a minute. And it can take up to a minute after I’ve chosen the correct alternative and said OK. Something seems to have happened to slow these functions down dramatically. I can’t find any mention of anyone else having had this problem, but there’s not much discussion on the Internet of Windows Speech Recognition anyway; and that’s also a problem: Dragon Naturallyspeaking has a very active support community.

I’ve uninstalled Windows Speech Recognition Macros and deleted the English United States voice profile that I had created in order to see if Macros would work and I’m now testing to see if navigation and correction have speeded up.

The other niggles I have are:

• How do you dictate an apostrophe followed by the letter S? In Naturallyspeaking you simply say “apostrophe S”. This doesn’t work with Windows; you’ve either just got to say the word normally and then correct it or you have to resort to telling the computer the individual keys to press.
• How do you set up user defined shortcuts? For example, in Naturallyspeaking if I often use the phrase Microsoft Corp. Ltd., I can enter this phrase into the speech dictionary and specify that I want it to be typed whenever I say, “MC Limited”. I discovered that you can actually do this in Windows Speech Recognition, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do it and you need to remember the phrase that you will pronounce as it doesn’t appear in the user interface of the speech dictionary.
• Capitalization is a bit of a pain. You can’t tell the recogniser to capitalise every word from now on until you tell it to stop. You have to either precede each word with “Caps” or, once you’ve finished dictating the phrase, tell it to capitalise the previous so many words.
• As is dictating brackets. Instead of saying something simple like “open bracket” you have to say “open parenthesis”.

On the bright side, since uninstalling Windows Speech Recognition Macros and deleting the voice profile that I’d set up using the English United States language setting, navigation and correction have returned to their former, acceptable speed. Perhaps it’s not a trip to PC World today after all (yes, they, too, are selling the full version of Dragon Naturallyspeaking for around £100, i.e., the same price as Nuance will rip you off for the upgrade).